Founded in 2013

BLOOM! Garden Center in Dexter, Mich., is part art gallery, part nursery and garden center and part boutique.

BLOOM! Garden Center in Dexter, Mich., doesn’t look like your typical independent garden center.

The layout looks more like a boutique, with plants tucked between vintage and modern garden art, local jewelry and high-end indoor and outdoor décor. There aren’t rows of shelves with perfectly placed products and linear aisles. Local brands can be found throughout the store. And that’s exactly how owner Traven Pelletier wanted it when he opened up for business earlier this spring.

Above the 2,000-square-foot garden center is an art gallery, housed in the upper level of a 2,400-square-foot barn that dates back to the 19th century and features local artists’ work, including pieces by Pelletier. In fact, the BLOOM! sign was custom designed by a mosaic artist. Downstairs, carefully selected, unique plants are displayed in an indoor/outdoor nursery within the 3.5 acre lot.

“We wanted to have some nice metalwork and nice stonework pieces and some local jewelry and crafts,” says Pelletier, whose background is in landscape design and build. “We have a lot of local and more organic, Earth-friendly growing items as well as local Ann Arbor seed companies. We have a friend with an organic farm who did our garden starts.”

Within the barn are offices and the other piece of the company, Elemental Design, a creative landscape and design build firm Pelletier began as a division of the Ann Arbor-based Lotus Gardenscapes, where he worked for more than a decade.

Part differentiation strategy, part melding of his own interests and creativity, Pelletier wanted to set himself apart from his competitors. When we first spoke to him in May, he hoped the three components would support one another – he was already starting to get contracting leads from people visiting the garden center shop.

“You’ve got to be on your game with who you are and about marketing it and have something different going on that people are excited about, or else you’re not going to make it,” he says.

Pelletier established the new location of Elemental Design in March, and BLOOM! had its soft opening in April. Garden Center magazine is profiling this dynamic IGC and following its progress throughout the year to find out just what it takes to set up shop in 2013, in an economy where entrepreneurs face the daunting reality that only about half of all new businesses survive past the first five years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Business Employment Dynamics.

The beginning
Pelletier described his first winter as owner of Elemental Design and BLOOM! as a nightmare.

Pelletier, 41, wasn’t going into the business blind. He started his new company after having success as a partner at Lotus Gardenscapes.

“[Lotus] went from a guy in a truck operation to a $1.5 million kind of high-end landscape, contractor-type business,” Pelletier says.

But Pelletier, a self-described risk-taker, wanted to try something new. So he took Elemental Design, his crew and customers and began his own brand on a property that had once been home to a Christmas tree farm and a nursery.

BLOOM! stocks high-end vintage and antique indoor and outdoor décor in the store.

Getting started
Acquiring that property proved to be the first hurdle. Pelletier approached the owners in the fall of 2011, after initially pursuing the property a couple of years earlier. He knew he wouldn’t have to start with a blank slate because a handful of green businesses had been there in the past. He went back in the fall of 2012 when he was ready to move Elemental Design and launch BLOOM!

“It was appraised too low. The owners were totally shocked, and they said there’s no way they could sell it for that low, which left me in a bind because I didn’t have cash to buy it and the bank wasn’t going to finance it,” Pelletier says.

But one of the first of many serendipitous moments happened. Pelletier had a good relationship with White Lotus Farms, which runs a creamery, bake shop and grows its own vegetables, and they happened to be looking for a new place to station their farm cart.

“So they bought the property for us, which is pretty miraculous. We lease from them, and we have a very friendly relationship where they bought the property, and I spent a lot of money making the property really nice. Even though it’s not my property, it wouldn’t have happened without them.”

Being new in 2013
In just three months, Pelletier and his team renovated the site, striving to create a homey, boutique, artsy feel.

"You have to have a unique brand and offer something else. Before you could have a place and you could sell bags of mulch and seed and some flowers. You didn’t have Lowe’s around the corner selling it for a lot less," he says. "Your independent garden center was your local source, and there was probably only one of them, and now there's five in the Ann Arbor area and now all the box stores are doing it, too."

Plus, you have to keep up and be consistent on the Internet and social media, which Pelletier has been updating since the winter, creating buzz long before the grand opening.

"The difference is the degree to which technology has taken over how you do business and marketing and being able to embrace that."

BLOOM! mixes plants within displays throughout the store to give customers inspiration for different combinations and décor ideas.

Unexpected circumstances
Pelletier was hoping to use money from the established Elemental Design business to jumpstart and float BLOOM! To say the season got off to a late start is putting it lightly. Winter overstayed its welcome, and Pelletier got behind financially.

“You usually base your numbers off of normal history, and I was counting on probably a good $40,000 to $80,000 worth of sales [from Elemental Design] by early April, which did not materialize,” Pelletier says. “I tapped out every possible amount of money I could possibly get out of my bank. It’s kind of your stereotypical story of a person trying to start a business.”

He also didn’t realize just how much went into setting up a POS system.

“Most of us had no retail background, so we really kind of went in blindly. And it was a total mess,” he says. “I would have definitely planned the retail systems better, I was just kind of like, well, we’ll figure it out as we go, but it’s been kind of hellish.”

Though Pelletier brought on his nursery manager, Stacey Rayer, a 30-year veteran of the industry who he called a "godsend," and had the landscaping business background, he didn't have retail experience.

“I think I have an eye for it, but I’ve never, ever done [retail]. If I were to do it again, I would never have been so laissez-faire about it,” he says. “I went to the IGC conference last year, and I did the Chicago tour, which was great. I saw a variety of cool places [such as Blumen Gardens], where I was like OK, this is what I want my store to look like.”

Things start looking up
What he learned during his year of planning and a few fortuitous moments helped the business come to fruition.

“I went on this customer visit for our contracting business a week after we opened the store in April, and I asked the couple what they do. They said, ‘We’re selling our store but we ran this really nice boutique kids store in downtown Ann Arbor,’” Pelletier says, adding that the couple ran eight or so different businesses and sold them over the past 15 years. “Basically they were retail geniuses, and they needed landscaping, so I was like, let’s trade. She ironed out the POS system.”

And Rayer came to Pelletier after she heard buzz about his new store.

The snow that just didn’t seem to stop falling finally halted, and the store celebrated its grand opening in May. Cars crammed into the parking lot, and they earned $2,800 in sales that day and $9,000 over the first weekend.

“Everybody was super happy – it was a really nice evening. It was perfect,” he says.

He paused at this point during the first interview, fighting back tears when he spoke about people who supported him.

“Even though we’ve obviously had really bad moments, the enthusiasm and creativity of the team pulling together, and then the support from the community has been miraculous," he says. "The store is really quite beautiful, and the place feels really dynamic and alive. It’s just a really nice place to work. I’m really happy to be here.”

Post-spring update
In July, Pelletier sent an email after we checked in saying because of financial issues, "we have had to make a bunch of hard decisions."

But like most stories, there was some good with the bad.

"We’ve got a good market, and we’re excited for the next season, but we’re kind of struggling somewhat financially because we pushed really hard to make the store really nice," he says. "It will be interesting to see how we make it through the winter."

Read the second article in the series on BLOOM!, "On the brink,"  in The September/October issue.

Photos by Lauren R. Yelen, photo of Traven Pelletier by Jeeheon Cho